Optimising the shape of aircraft to improve fuel efficiency and reduce the noise they make is a task normally carried out by highly-skilled professionals using high fidelity computational fluid dynamics tools. Swedish start-up Airinnova has been looking to change this, however, using resources provided by the PRACE SHAPE programme to fully automate parts of the optimisation process.
CO2 emissions from the transport sector are increasing, and at this point there are few signs of this trend reversing. Torbjörn Larsson of Creo Dynamics has been running a PRACE project that aimed to iron out some of the issues involved in running HPC simulations that can help improve the design of large vehicles and therefore reduce emissions.
Albatern’s wave power generation product consists of buoyant Squid modules which have three arms and are capable of linking with up-to three other Squids. The Squid modules and their link-arms contain mechanisms to generate power, capturing the heave and surge motion of the waves via hydraulics. In this way, Albatern an innovative Scottish SME of 15 engineers has developed a highly scalable, modular wave power generator. Albatern’s project supported by PRACE SHAPE marked the start of the development of a physics code capable of simulating and predicting the power of a large scale Wavenet array (100 or more devices).
On 18 November 2014, International Data Corporation (IDC) announced the eighth round of recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at the SC’14 high performance computing (HPC) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two sets of winners are announced each year, at the November SC conference in the U.S. and the June ISC HPC conference in Germany. This round saw a second winner from PRACE SHAPE, after the award for Thesan in June.
The power of HPC for solving problems is unrivalled, but it is not always easily accessible for small companies and those working in fields with low levels of computing expertise. The company Polyhedra Tech is aiming to change this through a PRACE SHAPE project. Its co-founder Pau Fonseca i Casas explains how they are optimising the SDLPS simulator for use in a number of different fields.
Successfully navigating spacecraft safely back into the Earth’s atmosphere is one of the pinnacles of human engineering, where the slightest miscalculation can lead to catastrophe. Marco Cisternino of scientific computing SME OPTIMAD has been working alongside PRACE as part of its SHAPE Programme to try and optimise the codes needed for this endeavor for state-of-the-art parallel computing architectures.
AmpliSIM is a web service that allows industrial engineering companies to model their environmental impact. As part of the SHAPE programme, Oliver Oldrini and Sylvie Perdriel have been parallelising models to optimise them for HPC clusters so that AmpliSIM can improve its service.
Mathematical modeling has been a standard tool for engineers for decades, but in clinical medicine, it is still a newcomer. The Finnish start-up software company Disior Ltd. develops computational software for treating bone fractures. The purpose is to bring mathematical modeling, known for its benefits in research and industry, available for physicians.
NEXIO SIMULATION is a French SME and subsidiary of Nexio Group, develops electromagnetic simulation software called CAPITOLE-EM to study the electromagnetic behaviour of any product during the design process, before the manufacturing phase. After a first step performed locally in France using the HPC-PME initiative, their PRACE SHAPE Project has allowed them by accessing to HPC resources and expertise in HPC and numerical simulation to jump from a personal computer version of this software to an HPC version.
Via PRACE SHAPE NSilico teamed up with computational experts from CINES (France) and ICHEC (Ireland) to address the key problem of rapid alignment of short DNA sequences to reference genomes by deploying the Smith-Waterman algorithm on an emerging many-core technology, the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor.
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